Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the New York-based Climate Museum, founded in 2014 by former social justice lawyer Miranda Massie. In particular it looks at its politics of representation through the exhibition Taking Action.

Paper long abstract:

Located in New York City, the Climate Museum is one of the world's first comprehensive museum dedicated to discussing and displaying anthropogenic climate change. Founded in 2014 by former social justice litigator Miranda Massie, the not-for-profit initiative, '[a] new museum for the path ahead' according to its vision statement, formulates modes of practice engaging visitors in the realities of global warming. The Climate Museum as it is being designed is a public-facing mission-driven institution responding to the belief that museums have the social power and responsibility to engage and inform the public on significant subject-matters. As climate change threatens planetary material and intangible culture and heritage, it compels us to imagine what Claire Colebrook defines as a 'proleptic' memory (2016), which is looking back to record and remember what is being lost in the present and future. Drawing on the Climate Museum's latest exhibition Taking Action, the analysis traces the museum's politics of representation, particularly paying attention to the ways in which the institution performs neoliberal and universalist practices seeking to produce empowered visitors 'solving' climate change. The paper as such outlines the leftist solutionism of the exhibition, examining the museum's narratives that are built on a neoliberal fantasy of empowered communities, while failing to address the multidirectional, historical and structural inequalities of the crisis. This presentation attempts to reflect on the incredible cultural magnitude that is asked of museal structures as anthropogenic climate change determines past, present and future cultural and mnemonic engagements with the planet.